The Left Grades Obama

Democratic lawmakers were the target of President Obama speech tonight--both moderates who are skeptical that reform is too liberal, and liberals who say they'll vote against it if there's no public option. So how did the netroots grade him? Looks like a B.

MyDD's Jonathan Singer offered some of the most glowing praise of the night. He tweets:

Fantastic, historic, game-changing speech. Expectations were atronomical, but amazingly met and exceeded

TalkingPointsMemo's Josh Marshall says he's not sure he's ever seen anything like the GOP congressman who shouted at Obama (CNN reports he said "you lie!"), noting that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was "visibly shocked by it."

Liberal health care guru Ezra Klein tweets some praise for Obama's pledge of automatic spending cuts:

The automatic spending cuts are really important. It means CBO can score things it couldn't otherwise score.

Open Left's Adam Bink doesn't like Obama leaving the door open to co-ops:

Says he is open to exploring co-ops. Awesome. Why are we still playing this game?

Daily Kos's mcjoan agrees: Obama should have defended the public option more strongly. She breaks it down like this:

What's good so far: called out "lies" in the debate. Reminding everybody that the Bush tax cuts and wars created huge deficits.

Not so good: weak defense of public option. Did a good job of defining it as the center by calling single payer the "left," but by arguing that it wouldn't really do that much, "Let me be clear, only an option for those who do not have insurance, less than 5% of Americans will sign up," isn't much of a strong defense of the public option.

See the full text of the speech here.